TREE PLANTING
We love planting trees video
I just want to talk about The Dazzle Cleaning Company and our excitement about planting a bunch of trees. So before the Industrial Revolution, there were an estimated 6 trillion trees on the planet. Now sadly, there’s only about 3 trillion trees. The United Nations Environment Program has The 1 Trillion Tree Campaign, which as you can probably guess: it seeks to plant 1 trillion trees! And I love this! Not just because I love trees, though I do love trees and not just because I love cleaning, though I do love cleaning and I love combining planting a tree with cleaning, but also because we know that trees soak up a bunch of carbon dioxide which slows man made or human made global warming and climate change. But trees also provide shade to other plants, and they allow a rich biodiversity to take root. So it’s if we want to be living on a healthy planet one thing we can do is plant more trees.
Every tree is estimated to capture over 400 pounds of carbon dioxide which is the equivalent of a car driving 500 miles. You have to clean a lot of houses to drive 500 miles! Trees act as the lungs of our planet. In 2017, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that US forests absorbed enough carbon dioxide to offset 11% of the nation’s greenhouse gasses for that year, which of course has a huge impact.
What’s our role in planting trees? Every time a review is left for The Dazzle Cleaning Company, we plant a tree. The way that this works is there’s a third party organization called Review Forest. Review Forest verifies that when a review is left we’re actually paying an NGO to plant a tree. The NGO that we’re working with is called Plant For The Planet. I love this NGO and they are part of the United Nations Environment Program. Check out the links at the end of this section to read articles referencing their work in The Washington Post, National Geographic and The Guardian.
The great thing about having Review Forest as part of this is that it verifies that this is actually being done so that you can trust that your tree is actually being planted, though of course we would plant the tree anyway because we want to be planting trees! Still, it’s like whoever it was that said, “trust but verify.” That may have been Madeleine Albright. We want to make sure that our clients can verify as well so you can see our tree counter at the end of this section as well.
Now, another great thing about this particular organization is that when we’re fighting climate change, not all trees are created equal. We want to make sure that we are choosing the right species of tree because we want to make sure that they grow quickly and really large and we want to make sure that they’re actually growing to maturity. And then it also depends on where they are planted on how big of an impact they’re going to have. So there’s some reasons why it’s better to be planting them in the tropics, you get like more of a carbon bang for your buck, essentially. So most of the tree planting that this organization does is planting in the tropics.
The other thing is that I don’t want to be engaging in greenwashing. We do know that tree planting alone is not enough. But it is one action that we can take to lessen our impact on the natural world and reduce overall environmental degradation and reduce our chances of getting to two degrees Celsius. We also are not just a carbon neutral company but a carbon negative company and we do a bunch of other stuff as well.
If you have any ideas on other things that we can do to help protect our natural world,
please let us know because we are super eager for that!
If you own or run a business and want some help becoming carbon neutral email Logan@dazzlecompany.com and I will help you out. This is just a volunteer thing that I do to help other businesses because I want us all to be doing this.
CARBON NEUTRALITY
Being carbon neutral is really great. It’s the gold standard that all industry, government and small business should be aiming for. But where things get a little bit contentious is how we go about meeting this goal.
Step one is always to lower our emissions as much as possible. We all agree on that. At Dazzle, we’ve worked really hard to minimize our emissions. We do this by using concentrated cleaning products, making a bunch of our own cleaning products, and by being extremely strategic with how we schedule homes to minimize drive time.
The question is: what do we do with all that remaining carbon? One solution is to buy carbon credits to offset the carbon that we’re producing. And this is the part that gets controversial and it gets controversial for good reasons. There’s a lot of great critiques about carbon credits, and I’m going to put some excellent articles at the end of this section that go into explaining that. This article from Vox is really great and explains this issue in depth.
I’m really passionate about doing what we can do to minimize the rise in temperatures that we’re going to see in the next century. Because of that, I want to support these projects that do work to reduce environmental degradation, and slow the warming of the planet that we will see in the coming decades.
The carbon credits that we purchase from MyClimate are more expensive than a lot of the other carbon credits that are available. We purchase them anyway because they have a proven track record of delivering on what they promise. And this is a big problem in the carbon credit world. There’s a lot of organizations that have had fraud or just an inability to be successful with their projects. My climate does not fall into that territory, which is why we always purchase our credits from them.
I also love the projects that we’ve spent the most carbon credits on and supporting because not only is it reducing the impact of climate change, but it is reducing deforestation and helping alleviate poverty and increasing the level of health in rural communities all of which are things I’m really excited about.
As Hillary Rodham Clinton would say, “let’s talk turkey.” The Dazzle Cleaning Company is responsible for producing about two tonnes of carbon per month and we purchase enough carbon credits to offset at least four tonnes of carbon per month.
We don’t just want to be carbon neutral; we want to be carbon negative. You can learn more about the specific project that we are supporting by clicking the link below. And if you run a business and you want to make your business carbon neutral, feel free to shoot us an email! I would love to help you, and that’s just something we do on a volunteer basis because we want everyone in the game!
BEING A RESPONSIBLE EMPLOYER
I’m Logan Taylor, the owner of The Dazzle Cleaning Company, and part of being a good business or a great business is being a responsible employer. I’m really proud of the workplace that we’ve created at Dazzle. I’ve said this a million times, but when I first started this cleaning company I knew that the best way to have happy, long-term clients would be to have happy long-term cleaners. In the cleaning industry, as you may be able to imagine, we have an extremely high rate of turnover and we, at Dazzle, have a very low rate of turnover, because of the workplace that we’ve all created together. We have lots of employees that have been with us for years and years. I think that they’ll continue to be with us for years and I really hope that they are.
Here’s a little bit that we do to make sure that we have a great staff. First of all, just because you can pay someone $18 an hour or $20 an hour to do something, doesn’t mean that you should . So we like to base our model off of how much it costs to provide a living wage job which is why full-time Dazzle cleaners make $27 per hour. They have medical insurance through Kaiser Permanente, which is great insurance that has gender affirming care, dental, vision, supplemental insurance, life insurance, which is paid for fully through the company, and 401 K with company matching. I think it’s 3% company matching. The first year that you are with Dazzle, you get two weeks of paid vacation and then the second year you move to three weeks of paid vacation. We also have competitive bonus structures in place as well as systems that make it easy for clients who want to tip to tip.
So what we’re doing is working really hard to provide an excellent workspace because it’s good business and it’s the right thing to do. I was listening to this speech, from Oprah Winfrey, and she was saying that her three pieces of advice she always gives. Number one, know who you are. Number two, always be of service or at least be of service. And then number three: Always do the right thing. Always be excellent. So that’s what we’re trying to do when we’re thinking about the workspace that we want to create.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s what employees of Dazzle have to say.
Want to work at Dazzle? Apply here.
MERRY FAIRIES
The Merry Fairies Program is a program where we clean the homes of people who are either experiencing an illness or disability that prevents them from being able to clean themselves or people who are senior citizens who just maybe are not able to clean in the way that they were before because of mobility issues or whatever.
Anyone who is part of the Merry Fairies program, if they’re receiving a Merry Fairy cleaning, does not pay for the cleaning. All Merry Fairy services are provided completely free of charge.
We only do Merry Fairy cleaning in Seattle. So we’re not able to provide that service outside of the city right now, but we hope to be able to have some time soon.
If you or someone you know would like to be considered for participation in the Merry Fairies program you can apply using this link. So again, we’re really happy to help clean the homes of people that are unable to clean for themselves for whatever those reasons may be, and we tend to focus on people that have mobility issues or illnesses or our senior citizens. Thanks a lot.
DONATION REQUESTS
We’re really excited about being engaged in our local community. And while we have listed on our website, a lot of the organizations that we give money to, there’s a whole lot more organizations that we support that we don’t include on the website because they’re small and they’re usually just want a gift certificate for their silent auction or some kind of a fundraiser that we’re they’re doing and we love giving those out!
If you want a donation for your event or your organization, let us know. We’re really happy to give back to the community.
We usually do a $250 or a $500 gift certificate depending on what the organization is. The gift certificates are for house cleaning, of course. They can be used for house cleaning, apartment cleaning, carpet cleaning, window cleaning, recurring service, deep cleans, all of it.
You can request a cleaning gift certificate or other donation by clicking here.
Obviously we don’t support anything that is politically conservative, or anything that doesn’t support our trans and non-binary friends and family and we don’t get too excited about programs that are like private schools. We love supporting public schools. So those are kind of what our general parameters are. But anything that’s in there, we’re usually really down to support that. So if you’d like to have a certificate or a gift certificate or a gift card for your organization, just let us know. And more than likely we want to be involved in whatever it is that you’re doing.
